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Intel Pro Wireless

The Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG (ipw3945) chip can be found inside many laptops. This page will help you install, setup and troubleshoot the IPW module (ipw3945), daemon (ipw3945d) and firmware (ipw3945-ucode) for Arch Linux.

Verification

First, let us verify that you indeed do have the ipw3945 chip installed in your laptop. We will install the package 'pciutils' which can be found online in the pacman repository, or on the Arch Linux CD. In most cases, you already have this package installed.

Installing pciutils

To install pciutils from CDROM: create the mount point /mnt/cdrom, mount the cdrom to /mnt/cdrom, browse over to /mnt/cdrom/arch/pkg, and locate the 'pciutils-*.pkg.tar.gz' file, then install it using pacman.

Using lspci to verify

As long as you see the network controller, you are good to go. The output will vary depending on your system configuration. If you do not see any output, then there is a hardware issue. Now that we are sure you have the ipw3945 wireless chip in your laptop, let's proceed to installation.

Installation

.. using stock kernel (default)

We will start by installing the ipw3945 package, which contains the module, daemon and firmware pre-compiled for Arch Linux Stock Kernel

# pacman -S ipw3945

Make sure that you TURN ON YOUR WIRELESS SWITCH! At this point, you should be able to load the module, and start the daemon, like so:

# modprobe ipw3945
# ipw3945d

And now, the daemon will run and start logging it's activities. We need to view these activities with 'dmesg', like so:

If you do not see the 'detected geography' line within 30 seconds of running the daemon, you will most likely need to compile a custom kernel (see below). If you do see the 'detected geography' line, skip the next chapter.

Setup

In this section, we will setup the module and daemon to automatically load on boot up.

# nano /etc/rc.conf

Simple add 'ipw3945' to the modules=() list, an add 'ipw3945d' to the daemons=() list. Note that you MUST add the ipw3945d daemon BEFORE the 'network' daemon.

Congratulations! You should now have a fully functional Intel Wireless Pro card in your laptop! You will find that there is a new interface (eth#, or wlan#) located in ifconfig. You can double check everything worked by doing this: